It is only recently that the government
formally acknowledged the
existence of sex slavery in Australia. In the course of her work in
Melbourne with Project Respect
Shirley Woods has met and assisted
victims of trafficking. The following is an edited transcript of her
presentation.

First I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of
the land we
meet on today and thank IWSS for inviting me here to speak. During this
forum I’ve spoken with women who have said they are
unfamiliar with Project Respect and what we do. So I’ll tell
you briefly a bit about our organisation.

Kathleen Maltzahn was the founder of Project Respect in late
1998.
Kathleen is an Australian woman who lived in the Philippines for about
5 years working with groups who were organising with women in street
prostitution. They were going out in vans with hot coffee, condoms,
pamphlets on sexual health, and that kind of thing, trying to build up
relationships with the women.

When Kathleen came back to Australia she started going out on
her own
to brothels to talk to women and find out if they needed assistance.
There was only one organisation then in Victoria - the
Prostitutes Collective which is now called RhED - Resourcing
Health and Education in the Sex Industry. They do some great work but
there’s not much in the way of resources and in Victoria we
have more than 90 legal brothels. What Kathleen discovered were the
signs and symptoms of trafficking which were familiar to her because
she had seen so much of it in the Philippines, and she went about
lobbying government and collecting together people who felt the same
way to join Project Respect.

It has taken an extremely long time for recognition that we
have a
problem with this in Australia. Nobody likes to think that in a first
world country we have a problem with sex slavery. Up until October 2003
when Mr Philip Ruddick was still the Immigration Minister he was in
complete denial that there was any such thing as sex slavery in
Australia. Within 2 weeks of Ruddick leaving his position and Amanda
Vanstone becoming Immigration Minister, all of a sudden there was an
announcement that the Australian government would put $20 million into
trying to stop trafficking in Australia. We were shocked and extremely
pleased that someone was finally taking notice.

There have been some interesting things come about since that
time.
Part of the $20 million package was for looking into changes in
legislation. One was a big change in the legislation that we are very
happy about. Proving trafficking in court was extremely
difficult under the old legislation because trafficking had
to be proven at the point of recruitment. It meant that the women had
to prove they had been trafficked back in the country they came from.
The difference now in the legislation is that deceit and conditions
have been included, so it’s not just about the recruitment
process any more.

We have the discussion with people all the time about the fact
that
many women who are trafficked come here knowing that they are coming to
do prostituČtion. This is true. We estimate from our research
among the women we work with that 80% of the women who are trafficked
into Australia, do know that they are coming here to do prostitution.
What they don’t know, are the conditions that
they’re going to work under —that they’re
going to have to work 7 days a week, that they will have to see clients
who they may not want to see, that they will have to do unsafe sex,
that they’re going to share a house with 8 other women and
sleep on a mattress, that they’re not going to be fed
properly, they’re not going to have access to doctors. So
this new part of the legislation is a real achievement.

You may not have heard that Australia had its first
trafficking
prosecution in June this year. The interesting thing about that
prosecution was that it was under the old legislation. We really
didn’t think it would happen. It was nearly 3 years from when
the women were discovered in the brothel to the time that the
trafficker was prosecuted. The trafficker was a woman and she got a
sentence of ten years in jail and hopefully that will be a big
deterrent. [1]

Speakers at this forum have talked about how different
situations
interlink. Ana Maria talked about interpreters. One of the problems
that came up during the trafficking court case was with language. The
interČpreters were good but the people working in the court
system lacked understanding of the difficulty, like Christy mentioned
before, about certain words or phrases not having an equivalence in
English. There were also problems with the way lawyers worded things,
like starting a question with the words, “Did you
not…”. The average English speaker has to stop and
think about, “Did you not,” let alone trying to put
that into another language. And if the women didn’t
understand and kept asking for the question to be repeated, they were
seen as just trying to be devious. Or if they didn’t
understand the question but later on did work it out and changed their
testimony, they were seen as being liars. There were all sorts of
problems with the lack of understanding about the differences between
the languages and how some words don’t translate easily.

This morning Sasi was talking about the power of images. When
it comes
to reporting trafficking, I think there’s a lot of media
sensation. Media grab hold of it and have “Sex
Slave” splashed all over the front page and many people have
a very limited understanding of sex slavery. There was a policeman in
Victoria who actually said, “When I walked into the brothel,
I didn’t see them tied up to the bed.” Because the
media shows an image of a woman with her hands tied, there’s
this idea in people’s minds that if a woman is sitting in a
brothel in her lingerie waiting for her next customer to walk in and
she’s having a cup of coffee, then she’s not a sex
slave. I know many of you at this forum are familiar with psychological
abuse and understand that if a woman is not tied to a bed it means that
she wants to be there. A lot of these women have had their families
threatened, their own lives threatened, the traffickers tell them they
will send pornographic photographs home to their families –
the threats are so incredible that they don’t need to tie
them to a bed, the psychological threat is enough. But, images can be
extremely powerful and we all get sucked in a little bit by the media.

The other thing that often comes up is the fact that many of
the women
do know what they’re coming here for. To illustrate the point
I’m making, I’d like to put to you a
hypoČthetical situation: I’m going to offer you a
job working Monday to Friday, 7 hours a day, no weekends,
you’ll be earning 80,000 Australian dollars a year and have a
company car. Does that sound good? Can you start on Monday? But, when
you get here on Monday there’s no company car –
that was all lies – and you’re actually working
Monday through to Sunday, there’s no day off and
you’re working 12 hours a day. Still want the job? No? Do you
want to leave? How? I’ve taken your passport, you
don’t speak English, you don’t know where you are,
you don’t know anybody in this country and you
don’t trust the authorities because where you’ve
come from the authorities are not worth trusting. So now what are you
going to do?

To say a women knows what she is coming here for, to do
prostitution,
may be true. But does she know the real situation she’s going
to face when she gets here?

Shirley Woods is a Social Worker who has worked
at Project
Respect as
the Outreach Co-ordinator for the past two and a half years. Her work
involves visiting brothels and assisting women in the sex industry with
any issues they may be having difficulty with. As a member of the
Prostitution Control Board in Victoria, she uses her position to
advocate for women in the sex industry.